[tombert]

I had no idea that you could even still get a copy of Dreamweaver anymore, but a quick search seems to confirm that, indeed, you can still get it.

As a teenager I used to use a pirated copy of Dreamweaver, and it was cool but I eventually just learned HTML since I found that the stuff I wrote ended up being better than the stuff being generated by Dreamweaver, and of course that had the advantage of being legal and free. I'm sure that the HTML exporter has gotten a lot better since 2005, but I have moved as far away from web development as I could since then because web development is terrible.

A small part of me wants to try the latest Dreamweaver now but I don't have a Windows or Mac computer anymore.

[ssag2]

Macromedia didn't mind the piracy at the time. People learned from pirated versions and then went to work in companies that bought licenses. They bootstrapped the company with that tactic. Same with Flash.

[tombert]

Not trying to make the piracy seem "right" or anything, but I would like to point out that I didn't make any money with the pirated Macromedia software either. I made a couple cartoons that got blammed on Newgrounds, did the examples in the Animator's Survival Kit, and then decided I'm not smart enough to be creative and did software instead.

[ssag2]

I worked with Macromedia at the time and they were all for people pirating their software and actually listened to them talk about seeding their betas to pirates.

[hereonout2]

This is pretty much my experience too, back then I had a copy of a 1000+ page book called HTML 4 The Complete Reference.

With that tome on my desk it honestly didn't take much work to be able to do a better job than Dreamweaver using notepad and writing HTML by hand.

I never got into the advanced Dreamweaver features, am sure I remember loads of stuff around managing complete sites with it, etc. But from a purely front end developers perspective it always seemed superfluous.